1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to sponsored product listings on e-commerce websites and, more particularly, to a system for page type based advertisement matching for sponsored product listings on an e-commerce website and method of using same.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known that a large retailer typically has a number of items or products stocked either in retail stores or distribution centers. The retailer advertises many of these items or products, for example, groceries, office supplies, household wares, etc. Typically, these advertisements appear on a webpage of a website of the retailer for allowing a consumer to search and/or purchase the products.
The website of the retailer typically hosts a variety of products curated in multiple advertisement formats to cater to different customer needs. For example, different advertisement formats include different advertisement types such as featured brands, e.g., sponsored products from a vendor or seller “X”, or sponsored products, e.g., sponsored products from different vendors or sellers “X”, “Y”, “Z”, etc. Typically, the website includes a homepage which gets the highest amount of traffic, search pages where users can search for products and get relevant results, category pages where users can see the different product offerings in different product categories, browse pages for browsing through a more specific category of items or products, topic pages which host highly relevant items or products related to a certain theme or topic, and finally product pages which are for individual items or products. Each page type has different characteristics and results in different types of user behavior.
For creating a successful performance advertisement program, certain goals for all the stakeholders involved need to be met and contribute to the long-term growth of the advertisement marketplace while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. For the consumer, the goal is to show the most contextually relevant advertisements, measured by the purchase (conversion) probability of the advertisement. For the advertiser, the goal is to target potential customers and increase discoverability of their products. The advertisers should be able to manage their products' reach by improving their bid prices or improve their performance by targeting specific customer segments. For the advertisement marketplace or the retailer, the goal is to rank the ads based on their performance in terms of conversions and ad revenues. If better products are ranked higher, it incentivizes advertisers to improve their product offerings, which improves the overall website conversions and brings in more revenues for both the advertisers and the retailer.
Performance advertisement (Ad) is a form of e-commerce advertising where a cost of advertising is based on a performance of an advertisement measured through impressions or clicks received by the advertisement. By virtue of the retailer's huge website catalog and presence on the e-commerce space, advertisements are a great platform for generating an additional source of revenue for the retailer. The current industry norm is to rely on one of the top advertisement platforms like Google Adsense to use the retailer dotcom's real estate to show third party advertisements. The Google Adsense program is designed based on keywords to incentivize advertising to improve their overall website experience. However, this approach has some disadvantages because of the potential bounces these advertisements can cause on the retailer's website pages. In addition, different sellers and products in an e-commerce marketplace have different conversion rates and profitability. Large eCommerce retailers can leverage their huge customer base and product offerings to attract sellers to advertise products from within the retailer's website and promote specific products.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a new system and method which matches advertisements and pages for sponsored product listings on an e-commerce website for a large retailer. It is also desirable to provide a new system and method that optimizes each website page type and each landing page separately. It is further desirable to provide a new system and method that produces advertisement rank based on advertisers' “Performance” and increases advertising revenues. Thus, there is a need in the art to provide a system for page type based advertisement matching for sponsored product listings on an e-commerce website and method of using same that meets at least one of these desires.